Julie May: Big data and privacy can be a blessing and a curse

Jan. 19, 2014

Written by

Julie May

For The Tennessean

How important is privacy to you? How useful do you find the privacy protection tools you use on the Internet?

These two items are intimately linked, but, unfortunately, the answers are often diametrically opposed.

For the more than 229 million people using social media in the U.S., there are three areas in which privacy is important: social, retail and government.

Social sharing: Are you sharing too much?

It no longer requires a long phone call to catch up with old friends. Social media provide us with the blessing of easy communication with friends and family members. By following your friends’ activities via social media, you almost instantly know their music and political interests, what organizations they’re involved in and whether or not they ended up with their high school sweetheart. And, if you take a look through even just a few of their photos, I’d bet you’d quickly learn their kids’ names, ages and interests, too. It’s a great tool — but is it too much information?

Sharing this information starts innocently. You take a picture with your smartphone and share it with friends by posting via social media. But did you know that the photo creates GPS tags of where the picture was taken? Facebook takes that GPS information and pinpoints where you took the photo on a map for your friends and whomever else your security settings allow to see it.

If you took it while you were out of town and posted it immediately, does that mean someone watching you now knows that you’re not at home? Stop and think about the implications, or curses, of this. In short, be conscientious when posting photos next time and manage your privacy settings so you know who can see it.

Connecting with retailers online and in store

So, what’s the big deal? As long as you’re aware of the content you’re posting and whom you’re sharing it with, social platforms give you wonderful opportunities to share your personal life with friends, right? Sure, but you should know that social media sites are also taking these data and providing them to retailers and the like to better target you for marketing. And soon, thanks to facial recognition software, stores may be able to recognize you from your Facebook profile picture.

There’s big money to be gained from big data. Search engines and social media applications collect data on you. They aggregate the information gained from cookies, which retain your personal preferences and information based on your computer activity, and suggest products you might like to purchase.

Then there are the inevitable successful credit card hacking incidents. The blessing is that we aren’t putting our entire credit card numbers on receipts any more. Never mind that checks have most of the information — such as routing and account numbers — needed to infiltrate a banking account. The bad news for credit cards is that all of the data from purchases made online and in the store is located in a “secure” database in the cloud. Payment Card Industry compliance is a critical component for any retailer, but even with the best intentions and technology investments, hackers can still get through if they are smart and persistent enough. It’s an unfortunate curse associated with a technical convenience.

Snowden and the government controversy

So, what does the government know about you? Here’s the bottom line: Former CIA employee Edward Snowden recently released documents from the NSA detailing thousands of American’s personal telephone conversations from a relatively small group of people. The NSA claims to have monitored only those conversations between people where there was a case of “reasonable, articulable suspicion.”

That said, there will continue to be a growing debate about who’s watching you and when. My thought is that Big Brother can find out anything he wants to, especially when you’re the voluntary author of your own activity.

Transparency in the Internet age can be a blessing and a curse. You have the ability to decide how much you’re willing to share and some moderate ability to decide who sees what, but can you ever fully escape the eyes of Big Brother — whether that be unwanted friends, retailers or the government? If you’re not interested in exposing private information to the world, your best option is to go without the Internet, and that just might be a bigger sacrifice than the new exercise and diet routine you committed to in 2014.

Julie May is CEO of bytes of knowledge, which she has built into one of Nashville’s leading technology companies, providing digital media development and comprehensive IT services. See more online at www.bytesofknowledge.com.